Downhill From Here: Running From John O'Groats to Land's End

By Gavin Boyter

Approaching his middle forties, Gavin Boyter wondered what his life was all about. A Scot living in London, single and with no kids, he was living for the job and the dwindling hope of a career in film. He had been a club runner all his life, pretty good but not at the front all that often. He was what he called an ordinary runner and he came to wonder just what an ordinary runner might be capable of. How about John O'Groats to Land's End, the longest linear run in Britain, and how about making a film of it? And how about writing a book? As usual, Gavin was neither the first nor the quickest but Downhill from Here is his real triumph, written in such an engaging and witty voice the reader accompanies him every step of the way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sandstone Press
• Release date: Apr 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781910985632

Book preview

SECTION ONE

Too Far North

JOHN O'GROATS TO TAIN

‘Fuck’s sake . . . arrghhh . . . Fucking hell!’

With these prosaic words I double up, clutching my left knee. Something has twanged under the patella, like a large elastic band snapping against the joint. It comes from nowhere and is excruciatingly painful.

I’m on the grassy bank by the side of a small road in Colinton, a leafy Edinburgh suburb. I left my parents’ house just minutes ago, wearing all the clothing and equipment I’d planned to use on The Long Run, with the intention of testing the GoPro camera on its gimbal device. It is two days before the event itself begins and I’m in agony, suddenly unable to walk. I hobble back to the house, shamefaced. My injury is captured in inglorious detail on camera and for the rest of that afternoon I continue to film images of myself prone, leg raised, ice-packed and immobile. Throughout the afternoon my mother fusses over me, giving me flashbacks to childhood. I’m forty-four years old but I’m pretty sure I’ve lain in the same position, in the same house, being ministered to with the same care and attention, almost forty years earlier. Comforting as it is, and helpful in terms of healing the injury, it increases my feeling of helplessness. The timing couldn’t be worse.

In less than 48 hours I’m supposed to be embarking on a 28-day, 1,100-mile journey from one end of the country to the other. At the moment, it’s a struggle even to get to the bathroom and I’m hopping everywhere, avoiding putting any unnecessary weight on the left leg. My knee has rebelled, seemingly for no reason and without warning. This could seriously jeopardise the challenge.

The pain is strange. It only seems to flare up when I bend my knee past a certain point (crouching is impossible) but remains a constant and throbbing low-level ache as I hobble around. It’s a kind of ‘background’ pain and, with the instinctive insight of a runner who has injured himself countless times, I feel it’s probably trauma caused by an unusual one-off event – something that happened when I was running. I put my foot down at an odd angle, something rubbed past something else and this pain is a residual reminder that my joints aren’t supposed to work like that.

About ten years ago my mother watched a TV documentary that caused her to call me and insist I go and see my GP. The show had featured people with hypermobile joints, near-translucent and highly elastic skin, small lumps of hard subcutaneous tissue and heart defects. I always had the first three symptoms and thought of my hypermobility as little more than an opportunity for party tricks. I can bend my left arm right around my head and scratch my left ear, for instance. The skin on almost any part of my body can be stretched outward an inch or more without pain. As a child I used to put pegs or bulldog clips on my face to scare and entertain friends. I couldn’t really feel the pegs or my awestruck friends pinching my skin. Apparently this was unusual.

The heart defect possibility was something new and worrying. After some persuading, I finally agreed to go and see my GP who, somewhat bemused, pored through a couple of books before deciding that I probably had Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome like the people in the documentary, albeit not the kind that came with a side-order of defective heart valve. With a mixture of relief and amusement I relayed this tentative diagnosis to my mother. I assured her that most symptoms of EDS, although weird, are benign. It’s a result of a collagen deficiency, I reported, and nothing to worry about.

Lying in that comfortable Edinburgh sitting room, I began to wonder if this EDS had anything to do with the way my knee joint had moved, causing a tendon to rub past a muscle or knob of bone. Certainly that’s what it felt like (although my knowledge of the anatomy of the knee has always been somewhat shaky compared with many ultra-runners). My mother remembered that my sister Fiona has a friend who was a physiotherapist. It was my best chance of getting an urgent appointment with a specialist who could give me a realistic prognosis. I called the physiotherapist, Geraldine Fergusson,¹ straight away and she was kind enough to agree to see me the following morning, just before we set off up north.

Nervous doesn’t quite cover it. I was borderline terrified as I waited for my appointment in a small physiotherapy clinic in Loanhead the next day. Geraldine prodded and poked, stretched and massaged the region in question. After around twenty minutes of thorough examination she gave me the news I wanted to hear – the tissue was inflamed, having been through some trauma but she couldn’t find any ongoing, underlying cause. My instincts were probably correct. It was an odd, one-off motion that had caused the painful event and the residual pain would fade.

‘If you were a normal person, rather than a runner, I’d say rest it for a couple of weeks,’ my saviour said, ‘but I know you won’t do that.’ She then treated it with ultrasound and recommended a mixture of elevation, icing, support, anti-inflammatory medicines and lots of sleep in between days of running.

In summary, it wouldn’t be easy, but nor would it be impossible to run.

Immense relief flooded me. Calling off or postponing the event now would have been difficult. We would have had to cancel twenty-eight hotels and my paid support drivers/ assistants would have been let down. A lot of money, training and time could have been wasted. That none of this would be necessary was the best news I could have received. I thanked Geraldine and we got back in the car and headed for the motorway.

Around seven hours later, we pulled into the car park of the Seaview Hotel, in the windy, rain-lashed northerly outpost that is John O’Groats. Tourism and farming are all that keep this remote, bleak place from returning to nature. It’s battered by northerly winds and rain throughout the year. Now, on the last day of August, it was merely drizzling, overcast and cold. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like living so far north in the middle of winter but then I am a lifelong ‘townie’.

Sleep came relatively quickly and easily that night, despite my misgivings about the knee and the scale of the challenge ahead. In some ways it’s difficult to really fear something you have absolutely no clear picture of. My trepidation was an abstract thing too non-specific to keep me awake. Nor did the rain, which grew heavier as it clattered down upon the corrugated metal roof of the hotel extension which contained our rooms.

The following morning Dad and I tucked into ‘full Scottish breakfasts’ while piped, synthesised version of folk songs assaulted our ears. We didn’t talk much; I suppose there was little to say except ‘good luck’ and neither of us had much idea what the day ahead would entail. We studied our individual laminated map books – twenty-nine pages of B-roads, trails and tracks highlighted and annotated with stopping points and lunch breaks marked every ten miles. It all looked so logical, so finite and achievable. The rain had thinned out overnight and although it still fell intermittently, mostly the morning was just breezy and overcast – a blessing, in September.

At around 9.30 am, having had a little difficulty setting up cameras and locating my fabric knee support, we started our mission at the iconic John O’Groats sign. Just as we arrived, a young man was setting off, alone, shouldering an immense khaki backpack. A sprinkling of anorak-clad tourists sprinted to and from the signpost to take photographs in the rain before dashing back to their vehicles. I shivered in my Long Run branded T-shirt and a thin jacket and shorts, while Dad set up the tripod for the first piece to camera. Once I got over my habitual awkwardness on the ‘wrong’ side of a lens, my opening spiel went relatively well and I jogged off, with a noticeable limp, at a fairly unimpressive velocity. With a month of running ahead of me, speed, for once, was not of the essence. The rain had stopped once more and held off for several hours and the traffic, although fast-moving on the comparatively straight, flat start of the A99, was fairly sparse. So far so good.

I caught up with the solo hiker after a few miles. His name was Dominic and he was walking the epic route partly for the charities he was representing (Cancer Research, Ghana Link, and Manx drink-driving awareness charity Isle Drive Safe) and partly because an old teacher of his had done it in his youth and recommended it as a life-changing experience. Dominic had the fervour and self-belief of a young man (he was only eighteen) and he knew his walk would stand him in good stead when he put in his Royal Marines application after finishing. He became the first interviewee for the film and I captured his energy and determination on my handheld GoPro camera.

Saying goodbye, I realised I’d found my inspiration for the day. As well as his positive example (Dominic was unsupported and mostly camping at night), there was the less laudatory thought that he must not pass me at any point. There must be no ‘hare and tortoise’ scenario. My speed increased as I made for the first rest stop, the start of the beach at Sinclair Bay, north of Wick. I’d hoped the A99 would remain a quiet A-road; of course that very notion was oxymoronic – they are denoted A-roads for a reason.

Trying not to get myself sideswiped by a wing mirror or surprised around a bend, I developed a technique which would stand me in good stead throughout the challenge. My default side was on the right, running into oncoming traffic. This is what the Highway Code recommends since it allows the pedestrian to react quicker to cars that might fail to see him or her in time. That said, on bends, I’d move over to whichever side was on the outside of the curve, in order to maximise the line of sight between me and the driver. And there were times when neither strategy would do, such as on blind summits, where I’d usually stay on whichever side of the road had the largest grass verge, so that I could take evasive action (i.e. leap aside) if required. There’s no doubt this added miles and miles in total to my intended route. After all, there’s a reason why the ‘optimum’ route in many marathons is spray-painted onto the tarmac – this allows the elite runners to run a proper 26.2 miles and gain precious seconds on each bend. The rest of us schmucks probably run closer to twenty-six and a half.

As I approached Keiss beach, around 10 miles in, I was in good spirits, enjoying myself and running around 9-minute miles, despite my worries about the knee. I passed the site of Scotland’s first Baptist church, a humble house with a plaque dating it to 1750 and dedicated to the memory of Sir William Sinclair, who proselytised throughout the region to the extent that a local bishop dubbed him ‘the preaching knight’. He conducted baptisms in the sea near Keiss Castle and published a book of sixty hymns. His home could probably have done with more than a carved eulogy, since it appeared to have fallen into a state of dilapidation.

I passed my father a little way down the road, standing on the verge with tripod and camera at the ready. He seemed to be getting into the rhythm of driving on ahead, locating a lay-by and leaping out to frame a shot before I got to him. His presence spurred me on; I’d soon memorise the number plate of his silver Mondeo and welcome its leapfrogging, hazard lights flashed in greeting.

My father waited for me, as planned, at Keiss Beach and I grabbed a ten-minute break in the car as a squally shower began. We could see the dark grey clouds passing overhead and were still hopeful it would clear by the time I set off again for Wick. I’d planned to run along the beach and we both thought it would be an excellent place to try out the quadcopter. These flying drone cameras were still fairly unregulated and it seemed an ideal time to get some aerial photography into my movie while it was still legal to do so. I admit, I’d taken a risk in deciding to use the quadcopter on the shoot. Neither I nor my dad had a licence for commercial aerial videography, which meant we couldn’t get the project insured. Going ahead without insurance was a little reckless but, in my naïve ignorance, I believed it was a manageable risk. For reasons which will become apparent in chapters to come, that’s not a mistake I’ll ever repeat.

Our good fortune held and the shower passed over us, leaving clear skies for us to fly our 4K camera along the deserted sands. Like most remote Scottish beaches, Keiss was empty. As Dad drove away in the car and I promised to wait a while before setting off, I stood gazing down almost three miles of deserted, uninterrupted sand. I needn’t have bothered waiting – the beach seemed to go on forever. There’s a strange optical illusion involving long beaches – if they’re a regular enough curve, their perspective confuses the eye and it becomes impossible to know exactly where you are along their length. After ten minutes of running, I couldn’t say whether I was a quarter of the way along or halfway, or more. Another ten minutes later it felt like I was running along a slow-moving conveyor belt going in the opposite direction. Surely I must be nearing my father though, as he prepared our ‘eye in the sky’.

We’d been training Dad up on the quadcopter for a couple of weeks. Each of the two joysticks had eight possible directions, with eight basic operations in total. The left one made the copter either ascend or descent vertically, or rotate on its axis clockwise or anticlockwise. The right control sent it forward, backwards, left or right, relative to the direction of the lens. To further complicate matters, two knobs on the front of the controller could tilt the camera from straight down to horizontal (or anything in between) or adjust the aperture.

Relatively straightforward, one might think, until we discovered that by rotating the copter 180 degrees, the directions on the right joystick became reversed. Rotate it by 90 degrees and forward becomes left, left becomes reverse et cetera. Flying it with any finesse involved learning and internalising these highly non-intuitive moves. My dad I and would go daily to a disused quarry in Edinburgh, not far from my parents’ house, where the secluded and empty bowl of rock would provide an ideal training ground for those early, erratic flights.

All in all, the drone was a tricky and stressful beast to master and by the time we left for John O’Groats, my dad had only just got to the stage of not panicking constantly while using it. As I ran along the beach towards him, I listened for the reassuring thrum of the copter’s motor. I didn’t hear it, despite seeing what looked like his familiar form in the distance, quadcopter case at his feet. I slowed down and then stopped, letting the hunched figure complete his tasks; the copter’s GPS system has to be calibrated, which involves rotating the device (and hence your body) in two positions, like a strange tribal dance. I didn’t see my father doing any of this as I stood straining my eyes to comprehend why he was suddenly striding towards and then into the sea.

It dawned on me that this was a random lone fisherman and not my father at all. The beach’s false perspective had fooled me again. I ran on, passing the imposter and then wading up to my ankles through an icy stream that wormed its way across the sands.

About a mile further on, I saw my father in the dunes and heard the quadcopter’s unmistakable hum. Self-consciously I kept going, no doubt gaining a little speed for the benefit of the imagined viewers. I didn’t want to create a ‘heroic’ shot of someone jogging pathetically slowly. Despite my growing fatigue, I dug in, leaving a trail of deep footprints as I ran under the camera’s gaze alongside the frothing breakers.

This felt good; this seemed cinematic; this was proper film-making. After a while, I doubled back to check my dad had got the desired shot and found him agitatedly claiming that he’d lost control of the camera and couldn’t see me in the iPad’s screen for most of the time. We got the quadcopter in the air again for another take and because time was running out, I was forced to leave him as the machine followed me, buzzing menacingly at my back. The pale golden sand eventually gave way to shingle and brick-sized rocks, impossible to run on. I picked my way along and then headed off the beach over a dishevelled barbed wire fence and through tough, spiky grasses before finding a path. As the drone’s buzzing dwindled away, I had no idea if my father had anything ‘in the can’.

Later that night I discovered that my dad needn’t have worried. Accidentally or otherwise he’d captured some great aerial images of sand, surf and a tiny figure loping determinedly along.

Having enjoyed my off-road excursion, I decided to keep following the coastline round towards distant castles and a lighthouse. What seemed like a trail quickly gave way to farmers’ fields. Not willing to be so readily dissuaded (I knew there would be some sort of footpath down to such obvious places of interest) I climbed my second barbed wire fence that day. There would be many more over the course of The Long Run. After struggling through long, wiry tufts of grass and alarming the first of many flocks of sheep, I emerged at the remains of a footpath to the impressively ruined Castle Sinclair Girnigoe, which dates back to the late fifteenth century and is probably one of the least frequented of Scotland’s many ancestral piles. Only three miles North of Wick, it’s worth a visit though, as are the horizontally striated cliffs upon which it perches. Clan Sinclair certainly had a sense of the dramatic when they built this edifice.

Further on, I passed a country pile in somewhat better condition – Ackergill Tower. Also fifteenth century in origin, it has become a five-star hotel. I worried a little about trespassing on its grounds as I picked my way along crumbled stone flagstones between the sea and its walls, until I remembered that Scotland has very different access laws than England.

Although the commonly held misconception is that Scotland has no trespass laws (The Criminal Justice and Public Orders Act 1994 specifies what is considered trespass in Scotland), it is true that much open land, including farmland is covered by a statutory right of access.² In layperson’s terms this permits access to land and inland waters throughout Scotland, provided land users behave responsibly. These rights actually allow pedestrians to access grassy fields, even when they are walled or fenced.³ I took much advantage of these freedoms during the Scottish part of my journey.

Exhausted from the slow progress I’d been making along the admittedly picturesque peninsula north of Wick, I was grateful to find an access road leading to and from the Noss Head lighthouse, which took me eventually to the Norse-named hamlets of Staxigoe and Papigoe. From there, I made it into Wick, got enough phone reception to call my support car and rendezvous in Wick for a late lunch. It was approaching three o’clock and the pretty but small town of Wick had little to offer but an enormous Wetherspoon. I didn’t care, devouring a plate of chilli and a large slab of chocolate cake as torrential rain began to fall. I realised I’d been usually fortunate with the weather so far. As it happened, the afternoon wouldn’t be so kind.

Stiff-legged, I set off once more, reflecting that I’d made it nearly twenty miles already. Two days previously I’d have been in agony trying to run to the end of the street. The body’s amazing healing abilities were surfacing, processing proteins and sugars, mending torn and inflamed tissues. In compensation for this good fortune, the heavens began to hurl down buckets of rain and the A99 south of Wick remained only just wide enough for two cars to pass, what little traffic it carried hurtling by. The rest of the afternoon would be a long, hard slog. My father kept leapfrogging me, filming from lay-bys and side roads, encouraging me through the seaside villages of Thrumster, Ulbster and Occumster. My legs began to rebel just after the town of Latheron, however, and I started to run out of daylight.

The nagging inner voices feared by every long-distance runner began to make themselves known.

You’ve done so well. Don’t push it so hard on day one – there’s a long way to go. Dunbeath is just an arbitrary stopping point along the route. Your support car can drive you to the bed and breakfast anyway.

Eventually I had to give in to the voices. They had a point. I’d managed around thirty-six miles with a decidedly dodgy left knee – that would do.

The owner of the unusually named The Blends B&B seemed to appreciate our exhaustion as my father and I stumbled in to the repurposed farmhouse a little after eight o’clock. Admitting that Latheron had little to offer in the way of pubs serving evening meals, she kindly whisked up a filling pasta dish and turned a blind eye to the boxes of equipment we lugged upstairs. My production assistant Carol, who would be joining us as support driver and camera operator later in the challenge, had booked two rooms but only the large family room had the en-suite bathroom, so my father and I decided to share. I grabbed the single bed and began what became a regular evening routine of charging equipment and transferring camera rushes to various hard drives.

That night I recorded my first video diary, after a few false starts, including beginning with the somewhat misleading words ‘So, it’s the end of day three.’ I was exhausted in a way I hadn’t experienced since my last ultra and, film tasks in hand, I decided to use the large, knobbly foam roller I’d bought for the purposes of self-massage. This was a fairly excruciating process but perhaps rolling my bodyweight over my quads and calves loosened them off a little. My sleep that first night was a little restless, not aided in part by my father’s raucous snoring (we rarely shared thereafter), but chiefly due to the ache in my legs and the difficulty of finding a comfortable position. As a rule, I don’t sleep well in unfamiliar beds and of course all beds for the next month would be unfamiliar. I could only hope fatigue would take over soon and wipe out consciousness. Eventually, it did.

Day two started where day one ended – by the side of the main road, which became the A9 just outside Latheron, on what turned out to be a potentially lethal blind summit, given the early morning traffic. I’d decided during my preparations that I’d be painstakingly accurate in terms of starting each day exactly where I left off the previous evening. I’d even bought some chalk with which to draw an ‘X’ on the tarmac but this seemed a step too far in practice. What my pedantry meant of course is that, if I didn’t make it to a town or village big enough to deserve pavements, the next day I’d often be running the gauntlet of rush hour traffic along the verges of A-roads.

So it proved on day two which began, mercifully, in dry conditions. After a few miles of forcing traffic to arc around me, Dunbeath appeared and provided the respite of running along pavement for a while. Not for long, of course. I soon noticed a pattern – pavement would start about half a mile out of town and dwindle away to grass verge around the same distance beyond the last buildings. Even when the verge was wide enough to accommodate pedestrians on at least one side, no provision for walkers or runners (or cyclists) was made. I suppose there might not be much uptake for 8-mile walks between towns. Nor would there be many runners who weren’t local enough to know whatever off-road routes might exist. Nevertheless, this constant feeling that the car was the only ‘proper’ method of transport between villages irked me.

That said, most drivers did give me a suitably wide berth and, once the school runs were over and the rush hour finished, the traffic lightened. Very occasionally a driver would seem to take umbrage at my very presence, grudgingly offering only a few inches of clearance. This seemed particularly odd to me – would they be so irritated by the presence of a cyclist? I was taking up no more room than a bicycle and my running towards oncoming traffic shouldn’t make any difference (technically it meant they’d pass me quicker too). The inchoate rage of a small minority of motorists at anything that might hold them up for a minute or two was hard for me to fathom. Road rage is such a self-evidently optional modern malaise.

As the A9 wormed its way south-west towards Helmsdale, the traffic began to build again. Large lorries began to rumble by and, as the rain started mid-morning, sheets of spray were thrown up by the wheels of eighteen-wheelers transporting everything from fertiliser to washing machines. The far north of Scotland has only one A-road heading north–south, and we were all sharing it.

Meanwhile, my father was a little way ahead of me having his own vehicular drama. He’d got used to the rhythm of driving three or four miles ahead, pulling into a lay-by or bit of waste ground and setting up a shot as quickly as possible. However, this time haste had got the better of him. Reversing up onto a small ramp by a disused shed, he’d misjudged the angle and managed to strand one front wheel off the side of the ramp. The car could get no traction on the damp gravelled concrete and was effectively stuck. Unfortunately, the car jack usually stowed in the boot was missing. Squeezing a pile of nearby planks under the stranded wheel proved ineffectual. It looked like a call to the recovery services might be required and potentially a long and shamefaced wait.

Salvation came unexpectedly in the wiry form of Davey Henderson, a local drystone wall builder who had seen my father’s crisis while driving his daughter to school. Upon his return, he pulled over and set to work with his pneumatic jack, sliding a plank under the car’s chassis and raising it sufficiently to wedge other planks under the stray wheel and level the vehicle.

‘I do banger racing . . . so I improvise, adapt and overcome,’ Davey revealed, working the jack energetically. He was good-natured and full of rather off-putting insight into the nature of the journey ahead.

‘Mind yourself on that bit of road . . . Fecking lethal,’ he warned, before describing a terrifying accident that had occurred on the next bend of the A9 and almost killed his wife. He didn’t seem to mind at all while my father told him in unnecessary detail what The Long Run was all about and filmed his mechanical prowess, instead of assisting. Davey even offered a get-out clause for my father’s bruised ego: ‘You’re not the first man to do this and you’ll not be the last.’

A little later, I turned the corner to see my dad parked beside a yellow van and my heart sank – was the support vehicle out of commission? Davey was just preparing to leave and my dad explained the whole thing while his Good Samaritan offered some sage advice: ‘There’s no diversions around it, unless you go way up the hill and then you’re adding hours . . . just be very, very careful.’ I vowed I would, hoping my father would take heed too, and set off again. Although a worrying incident at the time, the encounter with Davey was oddly encouraging – he was both interested in the project and had been proactively helpful. If other people we’d meet were this accommodating, we’d be fortunate indeed.

Precipitation. It’s not something that serious long-distance runners can pay much heed to. There’s no ‘waterproof’ jacket in the world that can keep out persistent, heavy Caledonian rain. Once you’re wet, you’re staying that way, so you had better get used to it, if running all day and every day is your aim. Actually, running in rain can be pleasant – it can cool the runner down, preventing overheating and dehydration. I find I often run faster in rain (admittedly sometimes just to get it over with quicker), and footpaths and pavements tend to be quieter and therefore easier to run. With soaked running shoes there’s no longer any point in avoiding puddles. I tend to splash through them, enjoying the feeling of regressing to a childish pastime.

In really torrential rain, sometimes only we long-distance runners can be seen plodding along, nodding or smiling greetings to one another in mutual recognition of our shared lunacy. I’ve even run in a thunderstorm once or twice, wading through rivers that suddenly appeared in place of side streets, kicking through piles of wet leaves and leaping fallen tree branches. At night, flashes of lighting would rip open the darkness and reveal torrents of water swirling with fallen leaves and twigs, drains failing to cope with the sudden load. These memories are amongst the most vivid of the period when I would run hard and fast along dark Ealing streets, chasing that perpetually elusive sub-3-hour marathon time.

Road running on the wet A9 was a little different. Trucks would roll by incessantly, hurling sheets of spray over me. It mattered little – I was practically half-amphibious after the first hour. The roar and proximity of these monsters on slippery tarmac was what bothered me. As visibility diminished, I hoped I stood out enough in my white cap and blue jacket to catch drivers’ eyes through the wet windscreens and arcing wipers. I ducked my head against the slanting water and dug in. And this monotony of rain and running went on and on and on.

A brief bit of beauty flashed by in the form of Berrydale. Every bit as quaint as its name suggests, the village nestles in a knuckle of rock forming a sheltered bay at the mouth of a small river. The road up to Berrydale is steep and winding and I had to take great care to listen for traffic coming around corner after corner. I passed my father on a bend, tripod at the ready under his umbrella, before heading down into the town, with its picturesque waterfall and bridge. Leaving Berrydale, the road inevitably climbed again; I decided it was too steep to run and slowed to a stride.

One thing the layperson might not quite understand about ultra-running is how much of it isn’t really running at all. For one thing, the terrain may make it simply impossible – footpaths comprising boulders or thick vegetation don’t lend themselves to safe and speedy progress. Secondly, it is sometimes unwise or physically painful to run when the miles have taken their toll. There’s little to be gained by running up a 12 per cent gradient for a mile if it means you’re utterly drained of energy at the top. Walking breaks are a vital component of ultra-distance running, particularly on multi-day